Leandro Katz: Rincones y refugios (Corners and shelters)
Conciliations
Leandro Katz’s unique gaze discovers an interlacing of visual arts and literature to weave new ways of understanding where words are pulverized. It is an oblique and penetrating gaze that, like the so-called strange attractors in microphysics, manages to put dynamical systems, that is the chaos of things, in order.
In this exhibition, Leandro Katz offers us a coherent world, one that can be traveled in a sequential or random manner. Let me suggest a potential itinerary: To begin, Siete luces elipsoidales (Seven Ellipsoidal Lights) – a drawing of the same number of small projectors shedding the seven emblematic colors resulting from the fragmentation of white light. Ideal for lighting objects or people with precision, these lights are guided by an ellipsoidal mirror – an ellipsoid of revolution, no less.
This leads us to the next series: the chromogenic compositions in Proyecto para el día que me quieras (Project for The Day You’ll Love Me) – a revolution in both shape and content where various objects, shadows and colored letters are at play. “A black, E white, Y red, U green, O blue: vowels, I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins” Rimbaud promises. Indeed Katz traces that promise, staging it. From Europe to the Americas: the transmigration of dreams. A condensation of the artist’s obsessions: Borges; Tania, the unforgettable guerrilla; Che. And, of course, Gardel, because the day you’ll love me is instilled in the letters that constitute the title of his song, and is reflected in a set of overlays that brings an archeology of memory to the present.
These readings are both expanded and condensed. Thus, in a 90º angle, there appears Himno arrinconado (Cornered Anthem). One slip of red rice paper per letter, no spaces, no respite, all in one breath, but audacious; that is, being made of two sides partially confronting each other, which we can read from the traditional left to right, yet also from top to bottom, facing nonsense (the other side of patriotic sentiment) out of which only one word stands out: Obledanda! Like an exclamation. Or a curse.
After which, a weightless empty road opens up like a series of questions. Desolated strip getting lost amid curves under the diffuse light of black and white photographs which lend grey shades the unsettling density of desolation. A space-time conjunction; Sobre la naturaleza ardua de nuestro progreso (On the Arduous Nature of our Progress) would seem to penetrate this mist, the unknown now always a few feet away.
So, it is time to make the leap. And the very short film La Caida (Otoño) (Fall) stages that leap and transports us to a place where the unknown erupts into a vibration of color, enthroned in the small and challenging Refugios (de la ira de Dios) [Shelters (from the Wrath of God)]. In drawing or corporeal, their festive planes invite us to a conciliation of diversity. Both in Refugios para facciones opuestas (Shelters for Opposing Factions) and in Refugios para grupos disidentes (Shelters for Dissident Groups) fantasies radiate at ease, allowing themselves, and us those multiple readings, which Leandro Katz’s work opens up to. These are works where conceptual art is not a mere metonymic approach, in other words a shift of meaning through proximity, yet a multiple metaphor; designed to be deciphered. They present enrichment in both directions in which observer, and observed, maintain a perpetual dialogue that runs on the luminous roads of imagination.
Luisa Valenzuela